“Most of us realize that politicians have a unique talent,” British fashion editor Annalisa Barbieri claimed. “Give them an outfit or a sentence, and they put it together in the most convoluted, illogical and unattractive way possible.” The matronly frumpiness of female political figures, with their dreary clothing choices (power suits with shoulder pads, the ubiquitous string of pearls) has rarely made first ladies and female politicians trendsetters.

Robb Young argues in Power Dressing: First Ladies, Women Politicians and Fashion that this perception is rapidly changing. A fashion journalist for the International Herald Tribune, the Financial Times, and British Vogue online, Young says that now, feeling less pressure to blend in with dark-suited males (those shoulder pads did serve a purpose), political women are expressing themselves through clothing like never before.

Today the media report on political women’s style in the breathless manner used for supermodels and actresses. But where the clothing choices of male politicians are rarely more complicated than the colour of their ties, women “take a gamble” no matter what outfit they choose.

A female public figure who doesn’t put effort into her style is criticized for being slovenly and dull, like German Chancellor Angela Merkel (Karl Lagerfeld: “The cut of her trouser is not good.”) If she puts in too much effort, she’s a frivolous spendthrift, disconnected from the problems of real people, like former Spanish Vice-President María Teresa Fernández de la Vega Sanz, whose every outfit was documented on a website which questioned how she could afford them on her official salary. The memory of Imelda Marcos, who, after her husband was deposed as President of the Philippines, was found to own 1,060 pairs of shoes, haunts all political wardrobes.

Fashion is still an unspoken “f-word” in the world of politics. None of the subjects of Young’s profiles agreed to participate. This forced him to find unconventional interviewees, such as local designers from their countries, other fashion journalists, and people who worked for the women, such as Sarah Palin’s stylist during the 2008 U.S. election, who describes the difficulty of glamming up the former Governor of Alaska without ruining her folksy appeal.

While his topic is appearances, Young’s analysis is not superficial. He includes such controversial figures as activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Saddam Hussein’s wife Sajida (current whereabouts unknown) and three of South African President Jacob Zuma’s five wives. Fascinating details abound. Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright matched her jeweled brooches to her moods (a turtle for when trips were going slow, a spider when she wanted to look tough). Rebiya Kadeer, an activist for the Uighur people, always wears a traditional square doppa skullcap, which the Chinese government takes as a direct affront. Embattled former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, known for her blonde braided crown, was forced to unfurl and redo her hairstyle on national TV to prove she did it herself.

Looking stylish may help some women, but for others looking unfashionable is an asset: President of Finland Tarja Halonen’s clothes never fit properly, but her dowdiness matches her down-to-earth personality and is beloved by the Finnish people.

Fashion provides an original entry into the messy complexity of world politics, and Young gives it the intelligence, style, and wit it deserves. If he could be faulted for not developing stronger arguments, it’s due to the breadth and intricacies of his chosen topic.

A book that places former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (whose coif was so firm that she emerged from IRA bombings un-mussed) directly next to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s wife Azam Al Sadat Farahi (little seen behind her black chador) demonstrates that, different as they may be, female political figures have at least two things in common. They all get dressed in the morning and what they wear, be it white pearls or a black scarf, will be noticed.

Earlier on this blog I argued that when we obsess about women politician’s clothes we prevent them from achieving equal footing with men. Robb Young offers another take: that political women, because of their wider sartorial choices, have a better opportunity to establish their background, values and personality through their clothes. But they must be careful: the world of fashion, like the world of politics, is very rarely simple.

Power Dressing: First Ladies, Women Politicians and Fashion by Robb Young, Merrell, 2011
reviewed by Max Mosher
photography by Samantha Walton

Every little girl dreams of becoming a princess—or at least that’s what people thought once upon a time. Nowadays, young women are more likely to look up to female pop stars, politicians, and professional athletes. But the Cinderella narrative, the hope of being plucked from obscurity by a handsome Prince Charming and showered with all the couture and tiaras one could ever want, still holds power in our collective imagination.

How else to explain the exhibit Grace Kelly: From Movie Star to Princess at the TIFF Bell Lightbox? The indisputably beautiful Kelly shot to fame in the 1950s as Alfred Hitchcock’s “icy blonde” in classics like Rear Window and To Catch A Thief, only to abandon acting to marry His Serene Highness Prince Rainier of Monaco.

Unlike the princesses-turned-celebrities Diana Spencer and Kate Middleton, Princess Grace went in the other direction. Her 1956 wedding was an international news sensation; MGM produced the official documentary, thus delivering the final film on her contract. Princess Grace turned tiny Monaco into a glamorous weekend getaway for her Hollywood friends. Gradually retreating from the camera’s gaze, she wrote poetry and pressed flowers, only to die in a car crash at age 52.

“Grace Kelly brings together the Golden Age of Hollywood, European royalty and the very best of 20th century fashion,” says Noah Cowan, Artistic Director of the TIFF Bell Lightbox. “Considered the epitome of elegance and glamour, she was also among the most significant taste-makers for women around the world.”

The show features personal items from Kelly’s time as Hollywood royalty (telegrams signed “Affectionately, Hitch”) and actual royalty (her famous Hermès purse, eventually renamed ‘the Kelly Bag’, with which she cleverly hid her pregnancy).

Despite her fruitful relationship with costume designers Helen Rose and Edith Head, most of the items on display are from Kelly’s personal wardrobe. In lieu of the glamorous gowns she used to seduce Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart, we have the simple flower-patterned frock, from an easy-to-sew catalogue, she wore on the fateful day she met Prince Rainier. (A power outage prevented her from ironing the fancier dress she planned on.) It mattered not, as the couple were engaged three days later.

Also on display is a replica of Kelly’s bridal gown. The original was donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art shortly after the wedding and is too fragile to travel. The gown, as Cowan explains, is thought by many to be French couture but was actually designed by Kelly’s MGM costumer Helen Rose, an example of Kelly’s overlapping careers as actress and royal.

The Princess’s ‘style icon’ status rests on the classic elegance of her 1950s look, but the exhibit documents her move away from grey tailored Dior suits to Yves Saint Laurent’s famous Mondrian dress and Marc Bohan’s colourful caftans in the 1960s, with, as Cowan puts it, “their corresponding turbans.” Then, after a dark silk jersey caftan designed by Madame Grès, photos of which later inspired Halston, the outfits stop, with no mention of what Princess Grace wore in the last decade of her life.

Afterwards, in the gift shop, as the sales clerks brought out the Kelly memorabilia, I thought about the marketability of celebrity. To be a Royal Highness is, presumably, to achieve a greater level of prestige than that of an actor, but we admire most Kelly’s screen persona—an elegant blonde who always kept her cool.

Becoming a princess solidified Kelly’s fame and crowned her with the adjective “regal,” but it also silenced her and flattened her image to that of a commemorative stamp. Hitchcock wanted the Princess to star in his film Marnie, but Prince Rainier reportedly nipped the idea in the bud. Introducing a classical-inspired draped gown by Christian Dior, which she wore when pregnant, Cowan comments: “Princess Grace did what any good princess should do, and created heirs.”

The glamour of royalty notwithstanding, as I picked up the Grace Kelly Barbie Doll, I hoped we could create a future for little girls more fulfilling than ‘happily ever after.’

text and images by Max Mosher

Grace Kelly: From Movie Star to Princess runs until January 22, 2012 at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox. Along with the exhibit, TIFF will be screening Grace Kelly films Rear Window, To Catch A Thief and Dial M for Murder as part of their series Icy Fire: The Hitchcock Blonde.

“Fashion has been sidelined and denigrated as a serious object of study for far too long,” says Dr. Alison Matthews David, Assistant Professor at the School of Fashion at Ryerson University. “Popular debates over it are highly polarized: we either love fashion, celebrating it uncritically, or we hate it, criticizing it as frivolous, feminine, and irrational. It is in fact a highly-rationalized, multi-faceted, multi-billion dollar industry that touches the lives of everyone who gets dressed in the morning.”

It is this bias which ‘Convergence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Fashion,’ a graduate student symposium hosted by the Research Committee of Ryerson’s School of Fashion, seeks to correct. On Saturday, November 5, graduate students with backgrounds in fashion design, art history, psychology, photography, philosophy, fine arts and journalism will present on a wide diversity of topics, from Pre-Raphaelites and ballerinas to globalization and guerilla marketing.

The interdisciplinary nature of the symposium reflects the mosaic nature of fashion studies. “It is still becoming established as its own field,” David explains, “which means that graduate students interested in fashion are largely trained in other disciplines. But these diverse backgrounds bring a lot of different perspectives to our discussion.”

While David thinks we’re getting better at unabashedly discussing fashion, she still meets people who have trouble understanding what she does. “I often get a surprised reaction from people when I say I’m a fashion historian and theorist. They immediately ask if I sew. I tell them that I’m the ‘intellectual nerd of the fashion world’ and try to present a critical perspective on fashion.”

While studying art history at Stanford University, David began researching the history of tailoring (which became the topic of her PhD) and has “never looked back.” Her work has focused on gender, social class, and material culture in 19th century France and Britain, but she says she likes to pick topics from all over. Last year, she co-wrote a chapter with colleague Dr. Kimberley Wahl about clothing in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series. “We were fascinated with the fact that fashion plays such a prominent role in transforming Anne from an ugly ducking to a beautiful, aesthetically-attuned and accomplished young lady.”

David was recently awarded a grant by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to continue to examine the dangers of fashion. “Corsets and heels cause mechanical harm to the body but fashion has also killed people through chemical contamination, accidental entanglement and fire, and the transmission of contagious disease through second-hand or contaminated clothing…

“I’m writing about mercury poisoning and ‘mad’ hatters, arsenic-containing green dyes during the Victorian period, and tulle and gauze skirts which present fire hazards for the wearer. I have been researching a ballerina whose tutu caught on fire at the Paris Opera,” says David.

Technology has solved some problems but created others, such as carcinogenic chemicals used by the garment industry. “The problem has not gone away and the problems the fashion industry and rampant consumerism still create are far from frivolous, unfortunately.”

David hopes the symposium will encourage students interested in fashion to pursue what inspires them and become “fashion nerds.”

‘Convergence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Fashion,’ will open to the public, free of charge, in Kerr Hall South at Ryerson University on Saturday, November 5th at 9 a.m.

Click here for the list of presentation topics.

text by Max Mosher
image source unknown

Like many of my generation, I grew up with the Back to the Future movies. For any of you out there who haven’t seen them, they centre on Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), a slacker teen who accidentally travels back to the year 1955 in a time machine DeLorean car.

The first movie is from 1985. Marty wears the tight jeans and workman’s vest that were trendy at the time. His outfit causes confusion for people of the 1950’s, asking him if he’s a sailor who’s jumped ship. Growing up in the ’90s, by which point fashions had already changed, I also wondered about the purpose of Marty’s puffy vest.

The sequel (1989) finds the protagonists propelled into the then-distant year 2015, in which plastic surgery is commonplace, TVs are flat-screen, and desktop computers gather dust in antique shops. (There are also flying cars, which we’ve been promised for the last fifty years. We should probably give that one up.)

The designers of the film had fun creating a deliberately retro-futuristic vision of 2015 — The Jetsons filtered through the ’80s. Pedestrians wear tights, New Romantic crinolines and fluorescent-coloured plastic caps. A gang of petty hoodlums dress like intergalactic punks. One of the more surprisingly accurate predictions of Back to the Future II is the 21st century’s ongoing interest in the ’80s: Marty wanders into ‘Café ’80s’ which features Michael Jackson tunes, stationary exercise bikes and, acting as waiter, the computer-generated visage of Ronald Reagan.

The Reagan era infuses the design of the shoes Marty later straps on: grey and white high-tops with a comically large tongue. For decades, such sneakers have been coveted by fans, with requests growing louder the closer we get to the actual year 2015. Finally, Nike relented, releasing a limitation edition replica of the footwear called the 2011 Nike Air Mag, designed by Tinker Hatfield and Tiffany Beers, who had a hand in the design of the original pair.

Like the shoes in the film, the Nike Air Mag features LED lights on the sole and heel and a glowing “Nike” on the strap. Unlike the shoes in the film, the laces do not strap themselves. (To achieve this effect in the movie, Fox had an electrical wire running down the inside of his jeans.)

Nike is producing only 1500 pairs of the Air Mag, sold exclusively on eBay, some going for as much as $10,000. All of the proceeds go to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.

What’s intriguing about the design of the Nike Air Mag is not how futuristic it looks, but how retro. Rather than reflect utopian visions of the next decade, the high-top design harkens back to the era in which the movie was made. Nostalgic revivalism trumps dreams of the future. Turns out the best prediction of Back to the Future II was how much tomorrow can look like yesterday.

text by Max Mosher